The Grand Duchess Lost
by PlanetOfTheWeepingWillow
Summary: Ivan becomes obsessed with finding the lost Grand Duchess of Russia: Anastasia Romanov. Historical fiction.


Recall, listen: Ivan Braginsky relaxed in the Tsar's palace. He spoke French in a relaxed tone, leaning back on imported cushions. The silks and fabrics he wore, painted a demurred red and gold, shone in the faint sunlight. Summer dragged on through the courtyard of Russia, the days stretching on well into the night and the night itself short lived. Ivan smiled at the little girl before him. Her blue eyes were pinned on the cloth before her. _Pluck-pluck-pluck_ her needle clumsily pelted it. She was energetic, bright, she was Anastasia. She pushed her hair away from her face. The day before a picture had been taken of her in that same room, holding the fabric she practiced with on the lap of her dress. Now she wore a bow in her hair. She should have been a boy.

Ivan recalled her father refusing to speak with the newborn until he had quelled the fury of disappointment. Ivan had been disappointed to. Then again, this sprightly young girl was charming in her own right.

"Where's Anya?" She asked, looking up at her, her cherubic face shining with pride at her new sewn fabric. She held it up before her. The other woman in the room, who had been conversing with Ivan on the state of affairs and other such boring matters, clicked her tongue.

"No, it is off, try it again."

Anastasia pouted and returned to working it. Eventually she grew bored and went off to cause mischief. Every day she conducted new plans. For instance, her favorite activity was to stick her legs out in the way of a maid's strut and cause the maid to stumble over the tiny leg and tumbled forwards, bringing out the gleeful, squirrely laugh of Anastasia's.

Ivan remained in the room, listening to the woman and seeing Maria cross the hall, seeking out her sister. Ivan stopped listening to the woman eventually and turned to the window, pinching the curtains and pulling them up. He restrained laughter. The woman sensed it, her nostrils flaring. She rushed to the window, holding her skirts, and glowered out.

There, perched on a tree, Anastasia pouted. She kicked at anyone who wanted her down. A series of servants stood around the trunk.

"Anastasia get down from there!"

She huffed and refused to.

"Oh I apologize for her rude behavior," the woman said, sounding utterly exasperated. She left the room quickly, calling to Maria.

Ivan let out laughter, enjoying Anastasia's energy and mirth.

The following day Ivan was not let back. Anastasia's poor back muscles had to be treated to. In response to her due massage she hid in the cupboard, screeching her protests. Ivan heard this second hand and wished he could have seen it—perhaps even have sided with her.

When her tonsils were removed and she profusely bled, Ivan's own heart catapulted. The poor girl, hemophilia possibly! He wrote consolidations. However, he seemed nothing more than a bothersome politician lingering in their homes. No one knew his identity. No one lived or saw him long enough to even create the slightest conjecture. Ivan knew and he didn't even want anyone to become curious. Unlike his fellow nations, he didn't want the rulers to know his identity for the time being; The Grand Duchess especially.

They had quite many of their own troubles to face, along with the newborn son, the long awaited heir, who kept teetering on the verge of death but remaining too stubborn, like his sister, to actually fall off. The girls, all four, doted on him incessantly.

Ivan once viewed these occasions. The girls crowded around the cradle, despite their mother's protests, and cooed to the infant. Ivan saw it only from the hallway, his arms behind his back. A pain throbbed in his chest. He wanted to take some sort of medication.

"Braginsky!" the Tsar called from another room. He gestured for Ivan to enter. Ivan took one last glance at the room and obliged.

They spoke for a long time and Ivan left, dignified, serious. He knew trouble was brewing. Not only was The Great War leering from behind an ill-concealing curtain. The "Reds" were not wanted. The "Whites" would get at them. Fate was set, Ivan could see it, but he had no choice but to bow his head and succumb. Blood now held in veins was ready to leak out into snow, the silver blizzard, and Ivan's own would mingle with the metallic scent, a flurry of flecks and at the center he could only in dismay imagine the girls in the other room.

When he passed the room again he felt a tugging at his sleeve. He looked down and spotted Anastasia standing there, smiling brightly. Ivan waited for her to say something. She seemed at quite a loss, briefly, shyly. Then she giggled and stepped away. Ivan realized something was amiss. He shrugged. Nothing serious could have taken place. He reached into his pocket, either way, and discovered his pocket watch had vanished. He whirled around. Anastasia stood at the end of the hall, holding up a chain connected to a circular gold watch. Ivan chased after her until she finally scrambled up a tree. She screamed at him in broken English, not bothering with grammar.

Eventually she tossed it down. Ivan caught it. The heavy chain hit his palm. He turned away and went home. The thoughts of the conversation crossed a different path in his mind, just as he stepped out into the streets. The streets where not his but _him. _Both white and red where him. Every part of the country, the good, the bad, the wise, the foolish, and all in between was him and him alone. If someone he cared for was to die it would be his fault.

"Don't get too close to mortal people," he was warned by others. He sneered. Even when Yao, the oldest of them all, gave him this advice he found it hard to agree to. How would he understand himself if he did not understand every part of his being?

Sighing heavily, Ivan stepped away from that house for the last time.

The next time he saw Anastasia was in a hospital. He woke up to pain in his belly. It was nothing like the battles a century ago. There were no rats crawling around one's head because there were not enough mattresses to rest on. There were no deranged, foul smelling men screaming insults. There was less of the torture apparent. Ivan rested on the white bed cloth, trying in vain to remember how he arrived to this position.

Was it… Who was it that shot what would be a fatal blow to his stomach and head? Ivan touched the bandages on his head and winced. Yes, a bullet had been lodged there. His feet hurt as well: trench warfare. Old army tactics met with new technology. Ivan watched the nurses trot by, serving food, applying ointment, helping the men with what they could.

Two familiar girls crept up to him. One of them set down a table with a chess board in its center.

"Will you play a game with us?" one asked. Her hair was unmistakable, her eyes, her squirrely laugh, the mischief swimming in her eyes.

"Certainly," he said, rising on the bed with shaking arms. Maria watched as Anastasia sat before him. They played for a long time. Once Ivan finally allowed her to win, she grinned and snapped the board shut. Maria took it and played with another, handsome man with a tawny mustache.

"I haven't seen you in a long time. How old were you then? Ten?"

"I don't remember," Anastasia said.

"And now you're what?"

"I'm sixteen," she said proudly, placing her hands on her knees.

"You're growing into a fine woman." Ivan said. She restrained a blush unsuccessfully. She said nothing. He cleared his throat. "Does your mother work as a nurse?"

"Yes," she nodded. "I'm too young so I talk to the men and play games with them."

"You're such sympathetic girls. Or is it empathetic? Either way you two have dear hearts."

She rolled her eyes, bored with such flattery. She thanked him anyway.

"I think I'll be out of here in a little while. Then I'll go back to the war."

Just as Ivan supposed, he returned to the battlefront, returning to the hospital two more times. The war took tolls no doctor could pinpoint the cause of. He slept poorly. He bled profusely from the nose, sometimes from the fingertips. At other times his heart seemed to fail. He worried that his country may be falling apart. But it was only the warning signs of a civil war.

Tobolsk. The Romanovs went there in their exile. Anastasia was bored and affected, writing in horrible English what seemed like a farewell letter to her friend. Ivan had no way to speak to her. He had no way to reach out and touch her spirit, to see her bright face again, the only sun in a gloomy winter.

"I think the Whites will kill them," a man with curly black hair told Ivan one evening as they smoked cigarettes and planned war.

"Kill who?" Ivan asked, perking up from the book he tried to read discretely beneath the table.

"First off I can see the cover of your book and second off you know who I'm talking about." He said harshly, writing a note on a yellowed piece of paper.

"You really think they can kill a Tsar?"

"Of course, what do you expect? The old way of life is out. We must find a better Russia."

The complicated web of history only continued to grow. The spider, the great mother spider of History, was unraveling silk for this new chain in her web, connected it to others. The web would expand and expand until she was killed or forgotten completely. Her thick, hairy legs reached out into the furthest corners. Flies, men who changed history, caught in the complex webs and tangled up the ties, changed history, effaced other parts. World War Two was looming, but not until the Tsar was shot. World War Two would happen after the Whites invaded and Anastasia, Maria, and Demidova huddled under a window. They cowered, fearing for their lives. The Tsar was dead, all the others were too. Tears threatened to spill.

Ivan knew none of this until a week after it occurred.

In the hall a stumbling, drunk figure named Ermakov threw his shadow against the wall. In a matter of moments a flurry of fight broke loose. A bullet grazed Maria's head, he stabbed, he shot, they bled, they lost consciousness, they died.

Ivan received a written message of the events told simply: The Romanovs are dead.

The message fluttered from Ivan's home. Conflicting emotions burned inside him. White and Red and clashing to be pink bubbled up like blood from the mouth. He writhed. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. He twitched in his dreams what little he had. Red. White. Black. Blood red. History's web was tainted crimson. The furry legs stretched out to continue that red. That silk was woven from loss and death and greed, as history was, and that's just the way it was.

Then, another message came to be, spread by way of tongue. No one knew where Anastasia's body was buried. She could be alive. She could have escaped., The twentieth century writhed with the intrigue of the mystery. Cynics were sprinkled throughout as well.

Hope, sweet, delicious hope rose in Ivan's mind. One of them, scheming, clever, loud, buoyant Anastasia could still be alive on the planet. She could be living off black bread pretending to be a peasant in fear of being located yet again. She snuck into wells to sip water. She was Dostoyevsky's vagabond who would give birth to The Stinker, but she would not. She was nothing like her. She was lovely, she was powerful. Ivan looked in the streets for her. In crowds he caught blue eyes and "strawberry-blonde" hair and the curved face and, when he blinked, it would vanish. When a pigeon swooped to cover that glimmer of a face it would then be gone again. Ivan's phantom limb tingled. His old hierarchy was gone. Things were changing and quickly too.

Before the Second World War could fully launch into reality, a woman appeared before Ivan. Her name was Anna Anderson. She was a lovely look-alike and in desperation Ivan believed. He drank up each word she told him. He believed that she really did play dead to elude the soldiers and then slip away. In 1920 so shone and then she vanished two years later. She was a fraud. She was a fraud but she was also a very faint, artificial beam of bliss for Ivan.

Other women appeared. Many imposters told many stories, telling hundreds of them in hope of gaining riches. Any woman with even blue eyes leaped at the chance. The dressed prettily. Some were convincing until they laughed, deep, hard laughter unlike Anastasia. Many dared even to make up a story so off from what had actually happened, adding chase scenes and blurry storms and dragons saving their lives that they were dismissed, no matter how similar they looked.

Then War struck, first hot and fiery the Second World War with poisoned ideas and ideals and the loss of lives by the millions. Then the Cold War. Then on and on and on…

The year must be nineteen eighty.

Now it must be nineteen ninety.

Still the question remained the same.

Ivan went up to the man crouched before a large screen, books open before him, a pen pressed to his lips.

"So, have they found any trace of her yet?" He asked cheerfully, a silk scarf around his neck and his hands buried in his jeans. Sometimes he wore a coat. Sometimes he wore a beige suit.

"No, I'm afraid not." The man said. A body had been found. Maybe it was Maria's.

"That's all right, keep looking." Ivan said happily, walking along.

* * *

_I do not own Hetalia._

_Although any scenes where Ivan interacts with them is obviously a work of fiction, many facts here are based on truth. Anastasia really was a disappointment to have been born female. She was suspected to have hemophilia (causing excessive blood loss) because her parents were carries. In fact, her father had Hemophilia B, I believe, a rare form. Anastasia was extremely mischievous and would trip her maids and climb up trees. She and her sister Maria were inseparable. She did visit hospitals during World War One and she and her family were under house arrest for some time. The details are very foggy concerning her actual death, considering the (actual) man who killed them was rather intoxicated and so on... _

_"Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when a promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?"_

_-Goodbye Blue Sky, _Pink Floyd

"_A sudden horror shot thro' all the Chief_

_And wrapt his senses in the cloud of grief;_

_Cast on the ground, with furious hand he spread_

_The scorching ashes o'er his golden hairs,_

_Those he deforms with dust, and these he tears;_

_On the hard soil is groaning breast he threw_

_And roll'd and grovell'd, as to earth he grew."_

_The Iliad Book XVIII, _ Homer (translated by Alexander Pope 1688-1744)

_Information mostly from Wikipedia, yes, I humbly apologize. Above the text from the Iliad is from a fancy little site for poetry. Neither of which I own. Only used to enhance the meaning. Thank you for reading. _


End file.
